“We’ve already come to it!” she cries. “Jeff is going to do whatever it takes to find proof. And there’s nothing about this that is good for you. I’m just taking up a year of your life that should be spent finding someone you can actually end up with. It was selfish of me to even consider it. And I definitely can’t let you risk your job over me too.”
I grip the phone tightly, appalled by the shift this conversation has taken. I thought I was on safe ground but it’s as if I’ve suddenly found myself scrambling up a crumbling rock wall instead. “Quinn—”
“No. Don’t try to convince me.” Her voice breaks. “When you care about someone you want what’s best for them, and I’m definitely not what’s best for you. I’m trying to do the right thing here. And I need you to let me.” She hangs up the phone and I sit here in shock, staring at it in my hand.
She’s crazy if she thinks I’m going to let her walk away over this.
* * *
I’ve told my grandparents that something came up. We say our goodbyes, and my grandfather walks me to the car, resting a hand on my shoulder as I reach for the door. “Are you sure you want to get involved with this girl? Even if you save her, it’s not likely to end well.”
As if I wasn’t painfully aware of that fact. “It’s too late,” I reply. “It was too late from the day we met.”
He sighs, reaching into his pocket. “I thought you might say that,” he replies, holding out a small black velvet box. “It was your grandmother’s. I never told anyone I had it because I’d have to explain why her ring and her clothes were still here the day she left. But she once told me that if something were to happen to her, I should hold onto it for the right time. She never told me when it would be, exactly, but I feel like it’s probably now.”
I pop the box open. It’s a very large oval diamond, surrounded by tiny ones. The exact ring Quinn described.
Which means my grandfather and I have had this conversation before.
14
QUINN
I’ve managed to stop crying but just barely, and my tears threaten to return every thirty to forty seconds. Trevor and Caroline gather in the apartment with a bottle of wine in an attempt to cheer me up. I appreciate the effort, but the truth is there isn’t enough wine in the world to make me anything other than despondent right now.
“You’re being ridiculous,” says Trevor. “Jeff can’t follow the two of you everywhere.”
“That’s what I said!” Caroline shouts. She’s been drinking at a much faster rate than the rest of us.
“He wouldn’t have to follow us everywhere,” I say quietly, staring at my glass of wine. “He’d just have to follow us once successfully.”
Caroline throws her hands in the air. “This guy is obviously your soul mate! And when you find your soul mate, you can’t just curl up in a ball and decide to skip it because you’ve hit a little roadblock. Especially with a dude who looks like that.”
I wish they’d leave so I could sleep. I want to sleep until this is over with, whatever this is. Grief, pain, shock. Except it’s not going anywhere soon. “It’s not a little roadblock,” I reply. “He’s going to lose his medical license because of me if this continues. Do you know how many years he’s invested in this? How much money? Four years of college, four years of med school, four years of residency. All to end up empty-handed because of me. It would be selfish to even allow him to continue this.”
“Well, I think it’s selfish of you to try to make his decisions for him,” replies Caroline.
I swallow hard, running a finger over the rim of my wineglass. “I hung up the phone earlier today and he never called back, so he must agree at some level.” It’s for the best he didn’t argue with me about it, even if it sort of hurts at the same time.
The two of them continue to argue until the doorbell rings. Then they exchange a glance and jump to their feet.
“You invited someone else?” I ask.
They both ignore me. “Get your purse,” Trevor says to Caroline.
“Wait…” I demand, rising. “What’s going on here?” I start moving farther from the door. Knowing Trevor, he’s called a male prostitute to cheer me up.
“You, my little sad sack, are going to do some chatting,” says Trevor, heading toward the door with Caroline at his heels. They open it and walk out, which is when I hear a voice I’d recognize anywhere.
Nick.
He walks in, so beautiful I want to weep at the sight of him. He’s wearing a navy-blue tee that makes his eyes look impossibly blue and ends right at his biceps. An arrow saying look at my magnificent arms couldn’t do a better job of calling attention to them. “It’s ridiculously unfair that you’re wearing that shirt,” I whisper, my voice hoarse with the need to cry.
His eyes move over me—hair, face, moving down to the floor and back up—before he remembers to shut the door. “I needed to use every advantage available,” he says, with the barest of smiles.
I want nothing more in the entire world than to fall into his arms like this is some dumb movie, but it’s not. “I assume Caroline and Trevor are behind this?”
He shakes his head, his eyes never leaving mine. “Nope, this is all on me. Fortunately, they both agree you’re being insane.”
I groan. “It’s easy for them to say that. They’re not the ones who will lose a medical license because of this.”
He crosses the room and presses me to the wall. “I’m not going to lose my license either.” His mouth lands on mine, hard. He kisses me with a desperation I feel all the way to my bones, one that matches my own. His hands move from my hips, slide into my shirt and it’s only when I gasp—the good kind of gasp—that he backs away.
“Fuck,” he groans. “What am I doing? I’m trying to persuade you to take me back, but not like this.”
I inhale sharply, wishing I could regret it as much as he seems to. So far, my attempt to do the right thing is going really poorly.
He pulls me against his chest, tucking my head safely beneath his chin. “I’ve been sick to my stomach since you called.”
My breath hitches, a small sob trapped in my throat. “If I were healthy it would be different. But I’m not. How can I let you risk everything for what will amount to a year or two of your long life?”
He pulls back just enough to see my face. “I can only assume you don’t feel nearly as much for me as I do for you or you’d get this. I don’t care about the years after you’re gone. I’m not even sure I want those years. I just want the time you have left, every fucking minute of it.”
I feel light entering more of the dark space inside me, as something that’s waited a lifetime to blossom begins to unfurl. But this isn’t about me. “That’s exactly how I feel too, but Nick…you should have seen the look on his face. He was really determined. He’s going to stop at nothing until he has proof.”
He gives me that cocky grin of his. “We’ll just need to be a little cleverer than him which—no offense—shouldn’t be that hard. He might try to trail you for a little while but eventually he’s going to tire of coming up empty-handed. In the meantime, we figure out what’s behind the tumor and if we can cure it, and maybe we find your aunt or somebody else who can fabricate a past for the two of us.”
I sigh. “Okay. I’ll try harder—to time travel, I mean. Maybe I can—”
“No,” he says fiercely. “I don’t want you to try anymore.”
My eyes widen. “Why the sudden change?” I ask. “A day ago, you were pleading with me to try.”
“That’s before I talked to my grandfather. We can discuss it later, but suffice it to say, it’s a lot more dangerous than I realized. We need to find another way.”
“What if we don’t, though?” I ask.
“We will,” he says. “We’ll find another way because there’s no other choice. You’re my life. You’re the only part of it I want. And we will find a way to fix this.” I love his words and they break my heart at the same time, because there’s this d
eep sadness to his eyes as he voices them, a sadness I can’t explain. Maybe he’s finally decided I’m not going to beat this. Whatever the reason, I have no doubt I’m the source of his pain, and that I’ll continue to be for a long, long time.
15
QUINN
Three days later, the perfect little house becomes ours. I oversee the delivery of our new bed and couch, then wait impatiently for Nick to get back from packing his place so we can christen one, or both. The last time we were alone for any extended period of time was last Monday in his office. Needless to say, we are both about to burst.
“Honey, I’m home!” he calls. His voice echoes over the bare hardwood floors.
I lean over the upstairs railing, smiling down at him. “I think we might need some rugs.”
“It’s perfect like this,” he says, taking the stairs toward me, two at a time. “I can demand a blowjob from any room of the house without even raising my voice.”
He walks right into me, lifting me as he continues on a path to our room. “Are you planning to demand a blowjob?”
He grins. “Of course not. I’m assuming you’ll offer one long before I get to that point.” He presses his mouth to mine and holds it there a moment before he sets me down in our room. “So this is the bed.”
“This is the bed. Is it everything you hoped it would be?”
“All I hoped for was a flat surface big enough to pin you to, so yes, it’s perfect.” He glances at the corner of my room, to the boxes I carried in from the trunk of my car, and frowns. “You already started carrying stuff in from Jeff’s? I told you I’d get it.”
I shrug. “There wasn’t much. I’m already done.”
His frown deepens. “Wait. You’re saying that’s it? That can’t possibly be all of your stuff.”
I slide my hands into his. “The tumor kind of brought everything into focus. I decided I was only bringing the things I really loved.”
This, to me, is a good thing, but when he averts his gaze I remember how much he hates even the smallest reminder this is all going to end. “Nothing about your tumor is normal,” he says, turning away to drop his wallet, phone and hospital ID on one of the boxes. “Your last MRI showed it hadn’t grown at all. Possibly it was even smaller. And also—it’s not affecting you. At all. I mean, aside from those seizures, you haven’t had a single symptom, right?”
“I guess not.”
“You should have,” he says, turning back to me. “So maybe it’s…this is going to sound crazy, but maybe it was just some weird time-traveling thing and it’s all solved now that you’re doing what you were supposed to. We’re back together, you’re getting your degree…maybe that’s it.”
There’s a desperation in his voice that saddens me. It’s what he wants to believe. And, God, I want to believe it too. I wish I’d never said anything—today is a day for us to enjoy what we have, not destroy it with thoughts of what’s to come. I slide my shorts off as he watches. “I feel pretty healthy at the moment,” I reply. The T-shirt is removed next.
His eyes flicker over me, gone sharp and feral in the blink of an eye. “You look exceptionally healthy.”
I walk over and lie back on our brand-new mattress. “How do you feel about taking advantage of an exceptionally healthy girl?”
He runs his tongue over his lip and unbuttons his shorts. “I’m feeling better about it by the second.”
* * *
That night we order Chinese food and eat it in our garden, on a blanket under the stars—a romantic way to deal with the fact that our kitchen chairs are backordered for the next month.
“When was the moment you knew you’d break up with Meg?” I ask him.
He sets his plate off to the side and leans back on the blanket. “That night in Baltimore. Sometime between leaving the diner with you and jerking off in the shower at 3:00 a.m. because of you.”
“You didn’t,” I gasp, wide-eyed and completely turned on by the idea at the same time.
He grins. “Are you kidding me? We were two seconds away from having sex when I woke up. There was no way I was falling back asleep without taking care of it. What about you? When did you know you were breaking up with Jeff?”
I try to focus on the question, but really I’m a little too busy imagining him in the hotel shower. I might need him to stage a reenactment. “It’s not nearly as exciting as your story. There’s almost no jerking off in it at all.”
He pulls me down beside him. “I kind of figured that much. But seriously, when did you know? I mean, you went to the airport with Jeff so it had to be kind of last-minute, right?”
I stare at the sky, wondering if I’m looking at the Big Dipper or just a bunch of random stars. “My dad told me this story when I was a kid, about the good wind and the bad wind, and how you had to let them both in. I always thought it was his way of telling me not to be scared of storms, but that morning on the way to the airport, I finally realized it had nothing to do with weather. It was about opening yourself up, risking all the bad that can come along with the good, because without it you will suffocate. And I knew I was suffocating.”
He gives a low laugh. “Wait, are you saying I might be the bad wind?”
I roll toward him, taking in the upward curve of his generous mouth. Right now, it’s hard to imagine him being the bad anything, but that’s precisely what makes him so dangerous. “You’re both, potentially. Because the more you let someone in, the more they’re able to hurt you, or drive you to do something terrible.” I get a sudden flash of Nick’s face when he walked in that room and saw me with Ryan, the agony there, and there’s a tightness in my chest—dread. Is it just residual guilt, or is it because I made a mistake after that, a grave one? That party was the night Ryan died. I already know I shot a kid out of a tree. What else might I have done that I couldn’t take back?
“I’m never going to hurt you,” he says, pressing his mouth to the base of my wrist.
I focus on the warmth of his mouth against my skin, trying to drive away thoughts about Ryan. “People hurt each other all the time without meaning to. It doesn’t have to be malicious. Like Darcy. When she dies it will destroy her parents. I’m not sure how anyone recovers from that.”
He brushes the hair back from my face and lifts my chin toward him with his thumb. “That’s why you’re hedging your bets,” he says. “You dumped Jeff and you were willing to risk being with me, but you’re still scared. You’re still trying to hold a little of yourself back.”
I’m on the cusp of arguing when it strikes me: he’s right. I agreed to marry Jeff but for some reason that never seemed risky, while with Nick it feels like I’ve gotten behind the wheel for the first time, and the only way I can stay safe is by riding the brake the whole way. “A lot could go wrong with us,” I whisper.
He pulls my head onto his shoulder. “And a lot could go so, so well. I can wait. You’re going to let me in eventually.”
That’s what I’m scared of. Because it feels dangerous, being with him.
And I’m worried I won’t find out why until it’s too late.
16
QUINN
We spend a blissful week acting like newlyweds. He goes to work, and I putter around the house, putting our meager belongings away, going to the store every five minutes for mundane things like trash cans and spatulas, the sort of stuff that doesn’t seem important until you discover it’s missing.
I’ve also tried to time travel a bit, without success. I know Nick doesn’t want me to—he's too worried about what happened to his grandmother. Every night he comes up with some new way to find Sarah’s address: he tells me we should check my dad’s will, go to the state department, search my parents’ computer. But it seems like it would be so much easier if I could just go back and find Rose myself, and it’s frustrating when I come up empty, time and time again.
For the most part though, we exist in a happy little bubble, and it’s easy enough to shrug off my fears. We cook together, shop together, sit
out on a picnic blanket under the stars each night to eat our dinner. We could have gotten plastic chairs until the real dining chairs arrive, but I sort of like our little tradition. I like that there is no TV, that we aren’t on our phones, that I get his full attention and he gets mine. And then we go to bed, where we do a lot of things, but we don’t have sex.
Which is getting more difficult to deal with by the day.
It shouldn’t be. We should be fine just as we are. But I miss it, desperately…not with Jeff, but with Nick. I miss something I don’t even remember having and he does too. Each night I see the toll his restraint takes, the way his teeth clench as he tries not to head in directions we can’t go.
We are in bed and he is above me, separated only by the paper-thin fabric of my boy shorts, and he’s got his eyes squeezed shut, wanting the feeling of being pressed against me and tortured by it all the same. “Maybe we should,” I whisper. I’m not sure if it’s logic or desperation speaking.
His eyes open, a hazy blue, with that drugged look they get when he’s in this exact position. “What?” he says.
“Maybe we should just do it,” I whisper. “We have no idea what will happen this time and I’m on the pill. So maybe we should.”
He is hard as steel against me the second the words emerge, and then a sort of panic comes over his face. “God, Quinn,” he groans, pushing harder against the fabric, burying his face into my shoulder. “Do not say that to me right now.” His leg swings off me, and in a flash he’s gone, nothing but a blur walking straight out the bedroom door.
I guess my timing could have been better, but I don’t feel like it was a mistake. I’m no longer sure what I believe in, but I know being with Nick makes me happier than anything in my life ever has, and every step we’ve taken together has only improved things. It’s just hard to imagine sex would be any different. It’s hard to imagine something so good could end up going bad.
Intersect: The Parallel Duet, Book 2 Page 11
